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Friday, July 03, 2015

Polygamy in the News: Three Articles

Nathan Collier said he was inspired by the recent Supreme Court decision that made marriage equal. He said he was particularly struck by the words of dissenting Chief Justice John Roberts who claimed giving gay couples the right to marry, might inspire polygamy.

And so this week, Mr Collier and his two wives, Victoria and Christine, entered a courthouse in Billings, Montana, and sought an application to legalise the trio’s polygamous union.

“Right now we're waiting for an answer," Mr Collier told The Independent. “I have two wives because I love two women and I want my second wife to have the same legal rights and protection as my first.” Keep reading

After Gay Marriage, Is Polygamy Next?

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last Friday that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to get married, Chief Justice John Roberts and many others have argued that the reasoning used by the court to justify the right to same-sex marriage gives "no reason" why plural unions should be banned.

Although the ideas of people legally marrying more than one partner and married couples adding other love interests to their state-recognized marriages might seem far-fetched, Roberts' gay marriage dissent makes the case that the majority's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, all but sets a precedent that could lead the nation down the slippery slope to the legalization of polygamy, also known as polyamory.

"Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective 'two' in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not," Roberts wrote. "Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition,a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one." Keep reading

Rapid rise in sharia marriages in Britain, many polygamous - lawyer

Britain has witnessed a rapid rise in sharia marriages with many of them polygamous, a leading lawyer warns today.

Aina Khan, a London solicitor who specialises in sharia, told Frances Gibb, legal editor of The Times, that there are now as many as 100,000 sharia marriages in the UK.

The problem with them is that they leave the women in particular with little protection in law, especially if they get divorced. Keep reading